Why we like fake stuff on Facebook
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales
One of my favorite essays for understanding modern life was published in May of 2016 by Jeremy Gordon. In “Is Everything Wrestling?”, Gordon examined the way that the news cycle had come to resemble a scripted WWE spectacle. As in a wrestling match, the boundaries between reality and fiction had become permanently blurred. Gordon writes:
With each passing year, more and more facets of popular culture become something like wrestling: a stage-managed “reality” in which scripted stories bleed freely into real events, with the blurry line between truth and untruth seeming to heighten, not lessen, the audience’s addiction to the melodrama. The modern media landscape is littered with “reality” shows that audiences happily accept aren’t…
